a. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to interactive and enhanced television and, more particularly, to a method and system that produces enhanced content that may be employed across a plurality of platforms without re-editing.
b. Description of the Background
A television program may be accompanied by additional information employed to enhance the program or to provide viewer interaction. Enhancements have historically included closed captioning and multilingual support. Advances in networking, computer systems, and video production have increased the number and types of enhancements that may be provided with a program or advertisement. Enhancements may include stock updates, news stories, Internet links, weather forecasts, bulletins, statistics, trivia, and other information. For example, a football game may include icons allowing viewing of team players, statistics, trivia and other information such as upcoming games. Further, the advent of set-top-boxes, as may be used in cable and satellite television systems, allows enhancement information to be presented in new ways, such as screen overlays and in windows, for example.
Enhanced television content may employ a combination of HTML (hypertext markup language), JavaScript, Java and other formats common to Internet page display. An enhanced display may comprise text, icons, graphics and images placed at locations on or in proximity to the television image. To produce an enhanced display, an author must create a file identifying each displayed element (such as text, icons, graphics and images), the location where each element is displayed and the time at which the element may be displayed. Due to numerous differences between presentation platforms, such as set top boxes, satellite receivers, computers, or interactive televisions, for example, content providers have historically been required to select a specific platform in the development of an enhancement application. In order to provide support for each additional platform, the interactive content provider must introduce potentially significant modifications to the existing application, resulting in the ongoing maintenance of multiple code bases, and adding to the time and cost required producing enhanced page layouts for multiple platforms.
Additionally, previous methods employed to enter parameters required to generate and position the elements comprising the layout of enhanced pages have involved significant manually entry. Manual editing of an enhancement file may also introduced unintended changes such that enhancements are not uniform across platforms. Therefore a new method of creating enhanced content that allows utilization across multiple platforms and provides an accurate preview of enhancements is needed.